I was nine years old when we returned to Oklahoma from California. We moved in with my Aunt Flossie, who had been married to Daddy’s brother, Henry. Uncle Henry and Aunt Flossie had relocated to Los Angeles when we were still renting a room at the Gramercy House, but they divorced somewhere along the way. She went home to Oklahoma City while we were still living near Bakersfield. When Mother and Daddy and I moved back, Aunt Flossie was kind enough to rent us one side of a duplex she lived in on South High Street. We shared a front room with her, and I had to put my piano in her living room so we could have two bedrooms.
With Daddy no longer able to pursue his work as a barber, he got a job driving a cab. Mother eventually found long-term work at Tinker Field, which is an enormous Air Force base in Oklahoma City. I’ve been told that it’s now the biggest employer in the state, and it might have been back then, too. In the 1950s, Buddy Holly and his band recorded some songs at the base’s Officer’s Club while they were on tour, which I thought was pretty interesting. I wish I could say I was interested in Mother’s job there, too, but it just wasn’t my world. She did something with key punch machines and data that they stored on punch cards. She started out as what they call a GS3, and started working her way up the ranks. She was always studying at home to move up a rank or get a promotion. As you know by now, it’s no surprise that Mother was focused, disciplined, and driven when it came to her work.
I started fifth grade at Crooked Oak Elementary School that fall, which is when I decided to start going by the name Wanda. I was struggling from the very start, so the principal called Mother and me in for a meeting. He expressed some concerns about my work and suggested that they put me back in the fourth grade. That was my first introduction to Oklahoma. Mother told him we’d discuss it, but I remember I was just heartbroken. I didn’t enjoy schoolwork, and I certainly didn’t want to have to repeat a grade I’d already finished. That just meant I would have to be in school for one more year than I needed to be. I cried and cried in the car on the way home, and all that night. I think Mother saw how upset I was and took pity on me. She went back to that principal and just begged him, “Please don’t do this to her. She’s just devastated. Her father and I will help her and will see to it that she studies.” I guess he saw that she was sincere, and decided to give me a chance. I dodged a bullet on that one!
I’ll admit that my grades were never stellar, but I wasn’t dumber than the other kids. I just didn’t apply myself. All I wanted to do was sing and play music, and it was impossible for me to sit still. That’s a trait I picked up from Mother. To their credit, my folks really worked with me on my school lessons. Poor Daddy nearly pulled his hair out trying to teach me math. I just could not get it. Daddy would get so frustrated trying to get through to me. He’d say, “Wanda, if you’ve got five apples …” That’s where he’d lose me. He’d try to break the problems down into concepts I could grasp, but it was an uphill battle for him. He’d get exasperated and say, “Can’t you see how this works?” I’d shake my head. Finally, he said, “Just learn it and do it. You don’t have to understand it!”
Though academics held little interest for me, I enjoyed the social aspect of going to school. It’s never easy coming into a school as the new kid, but as soon as they learned I could sing and play guitar, I was in. I made friends pretty fast, including a girl named Wanda Williams, who became my best buddy. The kids all started calling her “Wanda 1,” while I became “Wanda 2.”
I liked boys ever since I figured out I wasn’t one. I had a little boyfriend in school named Thurman. I don’t even remember his last name now, but I carried a picture of him in my purse. Mother would take me and Wanda 1 up to the school and drop us off for basketball games. We’d strut around with our long hair and our collars up. We thought we were pretty cool. We had no idea what we were doing, but I was learning!
I had become a California girl, so the first time I ever saw snow was when I was a student at Crooked Oak. We were on recess and I was just fascinated. I’d hold my hand out and look at each flake. I thought it was just the greatest thing, but the other kids must have thought I’d lost it to be so enchanted by something they’d already experienced many times over in their young lives.
Crooked Oak was pretty well out in the country at the time. There weren’t any swings or anything available to us when we had recess. It was just land. We had each other and our imaginations, and that was about it. One day when we got back in the classroom after playing in the field, we were hit with an awful smell all of a sudden. We thought someone had tooted or something, so we were getting tickled. It just hung in the air, but nobody would confess to the deed. Everyone was looking around the classroom when I crossed my legs and noticed a big chunk of cow dung stuck on the bottom of my shoe. It turns out I was the culprit. Boy, that stench was just running us out. I started laughing so hard. The teacher made me go out and scrape it off.
Obviously, that wasn’t my fault, but I can assure you I was sent out in the hall plenty of times just for laughing too much during class. I remember, when I was in fifth grade, there was a girl in our class named Jeannette. I was looking around the room and not paying attention to the teacher, as usual, when Jeannette starting heading down the aisle to turn in a paper. She was walking along minding her own business when that poor girl’s panties suddenly dropped around her ankles. I tried to be quiet but I couldn’t contain myself. I started snickering. Boy, she felt it right quick, and she just jumped out of those drawers! I thought I was going to lose it. I wound up out in the hallway over that one, but I couldn’t help it. I just loved laughing and having a good time. I’ve always loved a party atmosphere and, considering it was already starting at that young age, I guess I come by it naturally!
The school bus stopped almost right in front of our duplex on South High Street, so I enjoyed having a little autonomy to travel to and from school on my own. Since I would usually get home before Mother, she gave me my first little chore. It seems like we had fried potatoes with supper about every night. She showed me how to peel a potato, but she didn’t use a peeler. That would have been too easy. Instead, she used a knife. It seemed as though Mother did everything the hard way. She would have me peel the potatoes, and then she would slice them up later when she got home from work. That was my job. She also had me set the table before we ate. I think that was all she trusted me to do. She wouldn’t teach me anything else because she didn’t have the time. I don’t know if my mother was a great cook, but she did pretty good, and we all stayed fat and sassy. We had some kind of meat every night with fried potatoes and maybe green beans or something. She would fix a salad with just lettuce and tomato, and then use mayonnaise for the dressing. We just didn’t have that many choices. She couldn’t make elaborate things because she had too many other things to do. Mother was always in a hurry and wanted everything done “right now!” I do look back on those days fondly, though. In those days, people sat down as a family and ate together. Sadly, that’s not as common anymore, and I think we’ve lost something as a society by letting that tradition go by the wayside.
Mother and Daddy eventually built their first little house at 721 Southeast 35th Street, which wasn’t far from where we’d been living with Aunt Flossie. From our new house, we could walk down the street, take a right on Lindsay, and go a couple of blocks up to South Lindsay Baptist at the corner of 33rd. Mother joined the church soon after we returned to Oklahoma, and I did, too. It would become a very important place to me and my family over the years.
Mother was a real stickler about attending Sunday school each week. I could occasionally skip church, but never Sunday school. We had our little envelopes that we wrote our names on and put our little donation in each week. I’d faithfully put my dollar in there. Those envelopes also had little boxes to check on the back about whether or not you read your Bible every day, and if you studied the lesson from your Sunday school book. Those disciplines were ingrained in me, and I really loved the church and all the activities it provided. Baptists always give an altar call at the end of the service in case there are people there who want to surrender their lives to God. I didn’t really fully understand what that meant at the time, but I kept a hot path down that aisle. I wasn’t running from God when I was a kid. In fact, I was trying to run to him. It would take time, however, before I understood what it meant to accept God’s love and grace for what it is, instead of trying to respond out of a misguided fear of divine punishment. But that day would come later.
Some of my closest friends were kids I went to church with, especially Beverly Wright, who became my best friend and with whom I stayed close for the rest of her life. Everybody loved Beverly. She was a gregarious, heavyset girl, and the life of the party. By the time I was around twelve years old, we’d get together for parties at Beverly’s or someone’s house after Sunday services. I’d carry my guitar and sing some songs or do some yodeling, which I was trying to perfect at the time. I don’t know how I got it in my head, but I thought if I was gonna be a girl singer, I had to learn to yodel. I taught myself to do it by listening to it over and over on the radio. I jokingly tell people you learn to yodel by getting on a horse, getting into a good trot, and setting him loose on forty acres. That shaking will make your voice yodel right away! I remember the song “Chime Bells,” by Elton Britt, which made a big impression on me. That was one I would practice yodeling with all the time. That’s how you actually master it—practice! I was also very influenced by Hank Williams, so “Jambalaya” and “Kaw-Liga” became staples for me when I would sing at parties.
I mentioned before that my lack of athletic prowess guaranteed I would never grace a Wheaties box, but I was reminded of that one day while playing softball with some church friends. I was at bat, but when the ball came across the plate, I swung and missed. I swung that bat so hard that I spun myself around. At that moment, my friend Estle Wall had picked up the ball to throw back to the pitcher. Somehow, I got in the way, and that ball hit me right in the chin. I felt a sharp pain and what seemed like a ringing in my ears. I felt tears welling up in my eyes. I opened my mouth. “Am I bleeding?” I asked Estle.
She winced. “No, but it’s not good,” she replied. “You’ve broken your teeth.”
Sure enough, my two front teeth were cracked. Mother and Daddy took me to the dentist and, for several years, my front teeth were gold. They didn’t have much they could do back then in terms of white caps or anything like that. I remember the dentist telling my mother that, at my young age, he wanted to put something strong there that would hold up. I had those gold teeth until I saw a picture of myself. Of course, there was nothing but black-and-white film then, and that gold looked black. I couldn’t stand it.
We went back to the dentist, but he discovered that I had somehow gotten an abscess in one of those teeth. I don’t know why, but he decided he had to pull the gold caps off without anesthesia. Mother and Daddy and the dentist’s nurse held me down while he went to work. It was excruciating. They got those gold caps off and he said, “We’ll get those teeth out now.” He pulled out my two front teeth and then, for no reason at all, he pulled out the two on either side of those. He said it would look better for a bridge. So, ever since I was about twelve, I’ve had to wear a bridge. It took me forever to learn to talk with that stupid thing. I’d wake up in the morning and wouldn’t have the bridge in my mouth anymore. I would have woken up in the night and sleepily thrown my teeth across the room. I’d find them in the closet or down at the foot of the bed or something. Those fake teeth were my deepest held secret. I was embarrassed, and I didn’t tell anybody about it.
Mother found me a new piano teacher within walking distance of our house, but she didn’t understand the way the guy in Bakersfield had taught me to play. I had never paid any attention to that bass clef, but this teacher wanted me to start learning the left-hand parts. I just couldn’t get it. I would go to her house each week for a lesson, but I didn’t like her too much. I probably didn’t like her because she was trying to really challenge me and teach me, but I was always trying to do things my own way. I wasn’t interested in all her theory. I just wanted to know enough to get by and play the songs I liked, but she had me doing little kid stuff to try to teach me the rudiments of the instrument. She thought I wasn’t really trying, and we probably gave up on each other pretty early on. She got to where her boyfriend was there every time I’d come for a lesson. She’d say, “Now practice that for a minute,” and then she’d go over and they’d love on each other in the corner. It might have lasted as much as a year, but I eventually just quit. I can’t even remember what her name was now.
By that point, I was probably about evenly skilled on both the piano and guitar, but I couldn’t sing as easily while playing piano as I could with the guitar. Since people encouraged me to bring it when we’d have school or church parties, I increasingly gravitated to the guitar. I realized early on that’s what my audience wanted!
Since I was getting a little older, Mother would occasionally let me head downtown with some church or school friends. Capitol Hill was the main area where there were some movie theaters and a drugstore where kids could congregate. I would head over to that area with Mother every Saturday so she could pay bills and do some shopping, but I was just starting to become a teenager, and was wanting to strike out on my own without her sometimes. One of my favorite things to do was meet up at the drugstore at the corner of Commerce and South Robinson Avenue to get a Coke with my friends. It was fun to feel like I was just starting to become a young lady and could enjoy a little independence of my own.
Sometimes, I acted more like a dumb kid than a young lady, however. I once shoplifted a magazine from the newsstand across the street from the drugstore and snuck out with it somehow. I loved to see look at those movie magazines with Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor and folks like that in them. I was drawn to glamour, and for some reason I couldn’t resist taking it. I felt so guilty about it that I couldn’t sleep that night. I brought it back the next day and slipped it back onto the rack. Nobody ever knew, but I felt bad. I was driving by there recently with my granddaughter, who’s in her twenties, and pointed out where that newsstand used to be. I said, “That’s where I stole something for the first time.” She started laughing. “The first time?” she said. “How many more times were there?” I had to chuckle about that. “Maybe I didn’t word that like I meant to,” I told her. “It was an isolated incident. Your sweet grandmother doesn’t have a secret life of crime in her past!”
My favorite thing to do with my friends—when I wasn’t taking a five-finger discount at the newsstand like a hot-handed little kleptomaniac—was listening to the jukebox at the drugstore. We’d check out the hits of the day and talk about what we liked about each song. I especially loved to hear the girl singers and imagine what it would be like if I ever heard my own voice on a record one day. It seemed as far-fetched as the idea of me winding up next to Marilyn Monroe in one of those magazines, but I enjoyed the fantasy.
Just across the street from the drugstore was a little radio station called KLPR that had a small studio inside that could accommodate about twenty audience members. Sometimes after school we’d walk to the station and watch the performers play on the air. It wouldn’t be long before I would get my own chance to strap on my guitar, step up to that microphone, and beam my voice over the airwaves to the good people of Oklahoma City.